duration of tasks automatically increases

[confused]

Hi,

I am new to project server having used MS Project quite frequently.
With MS project, I would weekly update the percentage complete and re-level
the project, and then make any necessary adjustments to the plan to bring it
back (eg assigning more resources etc) in if the levelling had pushed the
date out.

With project server, individuals enter their own remaining work. the effect
on my project is to increase the duration of the task in question, and not
have any indication od which tasks have changed. In reality, if a task takes
longer than expected, the last thing i would do to the plan would be to
incease task duration, more lilely i would increase number of resources on
the task etc. How can i stop project server from deciding for me what action
to take on the plan?

Many thanks in advance for any help

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Confused --

Short of using Fixed Duration tasks, which I recommend only in specific
situations but not in your situation, start by asking yourself what your
team members are trying to tell you. If they increase the Remaining Work,
they are telling you they have more work left to do that originally
estimated. Usually, this means the task will take longer, indicated by a
greater Duration. Because of this, our company strongly recommends that if
team members increase the Remaining Work, they should ALWAYS add a task Note
and include the following information to document what they did:

Date: Increased Remaining Work FROM (original number) TO (new number)
BECAUSE (reason for doing so).

If your team members do that for you, it would give you an indication of
what they did before you approve and apply task updates to your project.
So, first I would recommend that you adopt the methodology that requires
your team members to add a task Note whenever they increase Remaining Work.
Second, after you apply task updates into your Microsoft Project plan, you
can apply a task Filter that will show you tasks in which team members have
increased Remaining Work. Create a Filter called something like "Increased
Rem. Work" using the following criteria:

Work Variance Is greater than 0h
And % Work Complete Is less than 100%

The above Filter criteria will show you all in-progress tasks (but not
completed tasks) whose Work exceeds Baseline Work, usually caused by a team
member increasing Remaining Work. Hope this helps.